The Third of Harvest Month, 1467
***
The mist never slept.
Lumis had learned that before he learned to read, before he learned to hold a sword. It pressed against Ebonhold's walls like a living thing — slow and patient, as though it had all the time in the world to wait them out. Some mornings he would climb to the eastern parapet alone, just to watch it. The way it moved. The way it suddenly stopped. As if it were breathing.
Ebonhold had its own kind of life. Heavy boots on cold stone. The constant ring of iron from the training yard. The smell of slightly burnt bread drifting up from the kitchens below. A guard coughing somewhere in the watchtower. The fortress had not fallen in twenty-two years — not since the night the mist came and swallowed half the continent in the span of a breath. The people inside carried that fact like armor. Not fear, but a quiet, stubborn pride that made them lift their chins whenever they walked near the walls.
Lumis moved through all of it like a shadow.
He was seven, but he carried the eyes of someone much older — still and watchful, taking everything in without offering anything back. The guards nodded at him when he passed through the narrow corridors. The women in the kitchen sometimes pressed a loaf or a piece of cheese into his hands without asking. Nobody was cruel to him. Nobody was close to him either. He was simply the child Walter had brought back from the mist one day — strange by nature, quiet by nature, alone by nature.
He stopped at the top of the inner stairwell and looked down at the yard below. Knights trained in pairs, their breath misting in the cold morning air. One of them was shouting at his partner over a wrong foot placement. A blacksmith hammered somewhere out of sight, a steady rhythm that never stopped. And children his age chased each other near the old well, laughing at something he hadn't heard, stumbling over one another and jumping back up still grinning.
Lumis watched them for a long moment.
Then he turned and walked the other way.
Walter had been gone for eleven days.
Lumis knew because he counted — not out of longing exactly, though the longing was there somewhere underneath, buried beneath the calm he had grown used to. Walter always came back. That was the thing about him, the one reliable thing in a world that offered very few. He would disappear into the mist for weeks at a time, and then one morning Lumis would come down to the great hall and find him sitting at the long table, muddy boots and all, eating as though he had never left. He never apologized for being gone. Lumis never asked him to.
He'll come back, Lumis told himself as he moved down the long corridor toward the north wall.
He always did.
He found his usual spot a few minutes later — a narrow alcove near the north wall, half hidden behind a stack of old crates that no one had opened in years. The stone there was smooth from years of sitting, and faintly warm despite the morning cold because the sun struck it at exactly this hour. From here he could see the main gate, the training yard, and a thin ribbon of mist coiling beyond the walls as if searching for a way in.
Lumis sat with his knees pulled to his chest and watched the world of Ebonhold turn without him.
An hour passed, maybe more. A guard came and went. An old woman crossed the yard carrying a basket of laundry. Two children argued near the gate and made up just as quickly. A knight straightened his stance after his instructor shouted at him. Everything in Ebonhold moved with a strict, familiar order — like a great machine that knew its purpose well.
And in all of it, Lumis was part of nothing.
The mist shifted beyond the walls.
He raised his eyes toward it — just for a moment, out of habit. But this time he didn't look away. Something was different. Not in the shape of the fog or the way it moved, but in something that had no name. Something that felt like sound but wasn't sound. Like warmth but wasn't warmth.
As if something inside the mist knew he was there.
Lumis stared at it.
And it stared back.
Then he heard Walter's boots on the stone behind him — that heavy, uneven step that belonged to no one else in Ebonhold — and he turned slowly.
Walter looked larger than he should have, as always. A tall man, broad across the shoulders, his face half buried in an unkempt beard, an old scar cutting through his left eyebrow. His clothes were muddy from ankle to knee, and his eyes carried that tiredness that never fully left no matter how much he slept.
But he was smiling.
"I'm back," Walter said simply, dropping onto one of the nearby crates, which groaned under his weight.
Lumis looked at him for a moment.
"I know," he said.
Walter laughed quietly and pulled something from his pocket — a piece of hard cheese and a chunk of stale bread wrapped in brown cloth. Traveler's rations. He held them out.
"The Academy," Walter said as Lumis took the bread, "opens its doors in three months."
Lumis didn't answer right away. He bit off a small piece and chewed slowly.
"And what about me?" he asked.
Walter looked at the mist beyond the walls. Then he looked at the child he had found alone in the heart of that white darkness seven years ago.
"You'll be going," he said. "Whether you want to or not."
∗ ∗ ∗
The sun had begun to tilt westward by the time they finished talking, and the mist was still watching from beyond the walls.
As always.